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VH Chapter in Night Beat

Recently discovered a book called Night Beat by Mikal Gilmore and has a great chapter called Van Halen The Endless Party and was written when the author interviewed them during the 1980 tour 2 sold out nights in Detroit. Never heard anyone talk about this before. Here is a bit from it:

ALEX VAN HALEN props himself on the edge of a dressing-room table and offers me a lenient smile. “Why should rock & roll be meaningful?” he asks in reply to a question about the seemingly slight themes of Van Halen’s songs. “I mean, is sex . . . He pauses, and a wistful smile curls his lips. “I was going to say, is sex meaningful, but I guess that’s the whole point: If something feels good, then it’s meaningful. And since our music is designed to make people feel good, it is meaningful.”

Just then, the door swings wide and Roth struts in, pulling a tall, moon-eyed blond by the hand. “Go to another room,” he directs us in a bearish voice. “Me and this lady got to talk.”

Alex looks the woman up and down savoringly, then snickers. “Yeah, I bet you want to talk.”

“There’s an empty room across the hall,” replies Roth, undaunted. “You guys can go over there.” Then Roth spies my tape recorder and an inspired look crosses his face. “Okay, wait a minute. We’ll give you an in-depth perspective of Van Halen.” He turns back to the young woman. “What was your name again? Okay, look, darling, this guy is from a magazine and . . . ”

The young woman sends a befuddled look in our direction and shakes her head. “You can’t fool me. I know who that guy is. That’s Alex.”

Alex laughs like a firecracker, and Roth looks embarrassed. “No, this guy here—he’s from a magazine and is doing a story about us.” Roth picks up the tape recorder and holds it up to the woman’s face. “Just tell him what you think of us.”

She looks even more confused. “You mean what I think of Alex?”

Alex erupts in laughter again, and Roth stares at the woman disgustedly. “No. Not Alex. Us. Tell the tape recorder what you think of us.”

“You want me to talk into this thing and say what I think about the band?”

“C’mon, babe, don’t waste the man’s time.”

The young woman gives a shaky look, then takes the recorder. “Okay, here I am and they’re asking me about Van Halen,” she says with a quivery Midwestern accent. “What I think of Van Halen is that I enjoy the show very much, and they rock & roll definitely all the way. It’s hard core, makes you want to move, makes you want to groove, makes you do anything you want to do. And for another thing,” she adds, smiling broadly at Alex and Roth, “every one of the guys in this band knows how to get down—that’s for goddamn sure.”

Roth pulls the recorder from her hand and gives it back to me with an uncertain smile. “I think maybe I just put my neck on the line.”

Alex, still laughing hard, takes me by the elbow and steers me out of the room. “Can you believe,” he says in a titillated whisper, “the mentality of some of these girls?”

Can't remember if Mikal Gilmore wrote for Rolling Stone or Spin, but I used to enjoy his articles a lot in the 90's when I read that stuff. I'll need to google him because it seems to me there is some movie based on some of his work... I could be wrong.

A little later, as Roth rests backstage, I share my theory of heavy-metal political intercourse with him. He doesn’t seem all that impressed.

“I don’t speak for kids,” he replies, “and I don’t represent people. I’m simply one of the people. But I’ll tell you this much: When that crowd out there tonight went nuts, they weren’t going nuts because David Lee Roth is so cool, or because Van Halen is so hot. They went nuts because they were enjoying themselves.

“That’s what we mean when we say there’s a little Van Halen in all of us and we’re just trying to bring it out. It’s like something bursts inside of you, something that makes you not care what people around you are thinking. It makes you feel invincible—like, if a car hit you, nothin’ would happen. It should make you feel like the Charge of the Light Brigade, even if you’re just going to the bathroom. When you do that on a mass level, it becomes hysterical, not political. It expands to a large group of people not caring about conventions, just getting into the thrill of being themselves. That experience is about the audience, not us. All we do is provide the soundtrack.”

Roth decides it’s time to join the party in the outer room, but first he has a final comment to share about the audience: “When people ask how far I think I’ve come in this racket, I always say twelve feet—from the audience to the stage. And when this is all over—because you know how it goes in this business—I’m going back into that audience, and back to the streets.”

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